Wired music: from PLOrk to ChucK and beyond

As part of an hourlong feature on wired art, New Jersey Public Television’s State of the Arts will be broadcasting a piece tonight produced by Eric Schultz on the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, otherwise known as PLOrk.

The piece was actually recorded last year, shortly after PLOrk gave its world premiere performance, to much acclaim. So what have PLOrk cofounders Perry Cook and Dan Trueman been up to in the meantime?

Cook is making music with a lithophone originally created with sculptor Jonathan Shor for Quark Park. Drawing upon his digital music expertise, he also is researching an inexpensive way to screen patients for the risk of having a stroke and developing technologies to help those who suffer from aphasia.

Trueman has spent the last year as a Guggenheim fellow in part working on his Cyclotron, which he describes as a “tool for tweaking time” and “a visual interface for experimenting with rhythmic cycles.” Trueman invented his Cyclotron more than a decade ago. But during his sabbatical he decided to figure how to hook it up to ChucK, a new music programming language written by Ge Wang, who just finished his Ph.D. under Cook’s supervision and in the fall will join the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics as an assistant professor.

Last year Wang got high praise for ChucK from Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka (aka Cory Linden), who wrote in his blog that that he was blown away by ChucK when he came to Princeton to talk at the invitation of Ed Felten about Linden Lab’s 3-D virtual world Second Life.

By the way, the Educational Technologies Center at Princeton is building a campus on Second Life. Blogger Aleister Kronos — who recently got a sneak preview and tour from Princeton’s charming virtual tourguide, Persis Trilling — describes it on 3pointD, where you can take a peak at Nassau Hall’s virtual doppelganger. Just below is the Second Life version of Princeton’s Chancellor Green, where PLOrk gave a fabulous in-the-round performance last May. Surely PLOrk will be headlining on Princeton’s Second Life campus sometime soon.